" PEOPLE WHO LIVE FOR THEMSELVES WILL NEVER BE REMEMBERED WHILE PEOPLE WHO LIVE FOR OTHERS WOULD NEVER BE FORGOTEN "

" They Alone Live Who Live For Ohters, Rest Are More Die Than Alive " - Swami Vivekananda


Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia Of Science And Technology














Isaac Asimov is a science fiction writer. Noticed one of his books titled “Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology “in the biggest book stores in Bangalore. This encyclopedia is considered as the highest ranked book amongst 515 books written by him. It contains the lives and achievements of 1510 scientists starting from ancient history to present date. To complete this book he took and gave life's blood of 12 - 15 years to encapsulate every minuscule life description of each of these scientists. After completion of the book he has written a preface which stands as a quintessential exponential view of human life in few sentences. He says: -












“When the book was ready I was both Happy and Sorry. Happy because I was able to study the life's of 1510 scientists. Sorry because I was able to study only life's of ONLY 1510 scientists considering the inadequacy of my time and research " And he further goes on to say: - " Most hearting fact of sorry and sadness for me is the fact that even though there were so many people who have come and gone from the day of human existence only few people have left their mark on the sands of time ". As per his statical research he says : - " Out of 60,00,000 lack people who walked this earth only 1 person lives mark on the sands of time - And REST DIE LIE WORMS ? ". Off - Course, Very very harsh statement indeed; But is it not true? When each of us die even the person in the next door does not know who we were and what our achievements were in the long life of ours.

" People Who Live For Themselves Will Never Be Remembered While People Who Live For Others Would Never Be Forgotten "

Couple of days back I attended a student’s seminar on personality development. One of the speakers of the conference asked a question and let the floor open to answer the question. The question which was asked was “Can you let me know the name of your parents?” All hands went up. Before any one of the students were able to answer; The questioner said “Wait, Let me not ask this question as I am certain that each of you would be able to answer with proficiency. Instead can you tell me the names of your great grand parents? "

None of the hands went up. When asked why none of the students were able to tell the names of their Great Grand Parents Names? One among the crowd stood up and said in the most intriguing manner “NOT WORTH REMEMBERING, Sir!!! ". In continuation to this question the questioner asked one more additional question "Do you remember the names of Chandrashkher Azad, Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru, and Sukhdev?”Each of the students started shouting Yes, We Know ): - !!!

When asked why they remembered these personalities? One student said: - “People who live for themselves will never be remembered while people who live for others will never be forgotten ". The speaker closed the seminar with a high note which would stand as an eternal wake up call for each of us. Remember this he said : - “If you do not want your great grand children to say what you just said about your great grandparents then lead a life which is WORTH REMEMBERING FOR YOUR GREAT GRAND CHILDREN AND WHOLE OF THE HUMANITY ".

February and March Should Be Considered As The Months Of Infamy In Indian History

Before I conclude this article let me heighten the node of view as to why this article circumferences around 5 personalities. First, 3 days from today; The April 6th is the death anniversary of Isaac Asimov. Second, February and March should be considered as the months of infamy in Indian History since India lost its 4 sons without their sacrifices history of India would have been written totally differently. Among them would be Chandrasekher Azad who shot himself on February 27, 1931. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were executed by the British Empire on March 23rd 1931. If I keenly observe India lost 4 sons within a time span of 25 days and all them were between the age group of 26 years {Bhagat Singh's age was 23. Chandrashekher Azad's age was 25. Sukhdev's age was 24 and Rajguru's age was 22}. Even if each of their age was less than 26 years they are being remembered by every youth of India even to this day for reason they lived and died for India and not for themselves.

Let me end by the few parting words of A P G Abdul Kalam “Lead a life such that you live a mark on the sands of time ". Are we going to lead such life is a persistent urgent question which each of us can answer during our last moments on our death beds! Is it not?

Or

Is it that we should ask this question at the end of each day so that our funeral will be a festival celebration for the world to enjoy !?

- Thanks
Rajhashekher BC - Raj
Sunday, April 3, 2011 5:29:01 PM
raj_rk2306@yahoo.co.in

MAN BEHIND THIS PERSON

Man Behind This Person



A boy born in a very poor family could not get proper education. He had to make his living by selling flowers on the road side and from going house to house. He could not get a proper job. Hence finally joined the india army as a soldier and fought against pakistan in 1965 war. Even after which he felt that all his dreams were crushed. Hence was returning to his home and spent some time at Delhi railway platform. His mind was so stressed that he decided to end his life of failure by committing suicide. As he was about to commit suicide he saw a book sales person trolling a trolley filled with books. Among the heed of books he noticed one book called “ CALL TO THE NATION of Swami Vivekananda "; Picked it and started reading it as he was standing on railway platform. He read this book 3 times at a stretch and decided there is nothing great in dying but real greatness lies in living for the country. Who was this boy ?

Yes, it is same person around whom whole of India is rallying around from past 5 days. It's Anna Hazare.



- Thanks
Rajhashekher BC - Raj
Sunday, April 10, 2011 12:25:32 AM






Transcript Of " Call To The Nation " Can Be Accessed By Clicking On This Universal Resource Link : - http://www.scribd.com/doc/10094818/Call-to-Nation-Swami-Vivekananda

WHAT IS EDUCATION ? ARE WE EDUCATED ?

First, those who manage well the circumstances which they encounter day by day; and those who can judge situations appropriately as they arise and rarely miss the suitable course of action.

Next, those who are honorable in their dealings with all men, bearing easily what is unpleasant or offensive in others, and being as reasonable with their associates as is humanly possible.

Furthermore, those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not unduly overcome by their misfortunes, bearing up under them bravely and in a manner worthy of our common nature.

Most important of all, those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves, but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober - minded men, rejoicing no more in the good things that have come to them through chance than in those which through their own nature and intelligence are theirs since birth.

Those who have a character which is in accord, not with one of these things, but with all of them, these are educated - possessed of all the virtues.

- Socrates { 470 - 399 B.C )
Sat, 30 April, 2011 11:11:49 PM

" TOO DEEP FOR TEARS " - AN EQUATION HAS NO MEANING UNLESS IT EXPRESSES A THOUGHT OF GOD

“You know how many sciences had their origin in India. Mathematics began there. You are even today counting 1, 2, 3, etc. to zero, after Sanskrit figures, and you all know that algebra also originated in India” - Swami Vivekananda


Indian’s Are The One’s Who Taught The World How To Count

When people say there is no scientific rationality in India I remain silent. My uniform silence is always intermingled with deep sense of remorse. For the reason that world would not have known what science IS, but for us {The Indian’s}. Another coliseum subject which is the undercurrent of science is Mathematics and came into existence in this very land of ours. To which - " World should owe a lot to us. As we taught the world how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have made“. These words were not echoed by me but by Albert Einstein.






TODAY'S ARTICLE is based on one such mind shivering personality from the never ceasing lineage of Indian Mathematicians from the annals of known history.

So Poor For A Sheet Of Paper But So Rich So, That World Is Still Baffled By His Notes.

Two days from today - 26th April, Is the death anniversary of Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan.



Ramanujan who was born so poor that he did not have reserves to buy a sheet of paper to record his formulae's. Because of which he used to write many of his calculations on a slate with chalk and used to erase them with his elbow for want of space; Sometimes he would write in red ink on paper already written as he could not afford another sheet of paper. This poor boy working at accounts department at port trust office of Madras {with no university education} sent nine paper of closely written mathematical formulae to Mathematician G.H. Hardy of Cambridge University. Notes which contained starting conclusions as diverse as divergent series and the negative values of gamma function. Some of them even refuted Hardy's own papers. By general glancing at those conclusions, Hardy thought the author might be a Crank and Sysco. But deep study of those conclusions reveled and made Hardy to realize that they “Could only be written by a mathematician of highest order. And they are bound to be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them".



Those notes were only the foretaste of the prodigious calculations to come. So vastly prodigious was Ramanujan’s insight that even to this day mathematicians across the globe still remain confound; NINETY DECADES after his demise. Many of his ideas are used today in cosmology and computer science. His farsightedness was so vast that theorems written by him during his life time {In between 1887 - 1920} are being applied in areas of polymer chemistry, computers, cancer research now; which in those days were not even thought about. His insights were so rich so that world is baffled that anyone could even think to derive them in the first place.

Short Striking Stories Of His Life – Too Deep For Tears

* Ramanujan had these childish questions “ How far is it between clouds?”. His headmaster seeing his caliber declared that he “Deserved higher than the maximum possible marks".

* Ramanujan once said “An equation has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of GOD“.

* During his first Cambridge lecture he was asked by a professor whether he wanted to add anything ? Ramanujan, went to the black board and wrote results the professor had not yet proved – and which he could not have know before.

* Once Hardy visited his ailing protégé in a nursing home and commented that the license number of the cab which he came in, 1729, was “rather a dull number ". For which ailing Ramanujan reacted instantly. “No. Hardy. It is very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways".

When Ramanujan died { @ the age of 32 } at the height of his powers, he left a final note book full of formulae - 650 theorems as his body was being inexorably consumed by tuberculosis. His doctor’s words “TOO DEEP FOR TEARS“ would remind us of the phenomenon called Ramanujan.



Is it not!?

- Thanks
Rajhashekher BC - Raj

Sunday, april 24, 2011 11:13:16 PM

WHERE THE MIND IS WITHOUT FEAR

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

" Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action into that heaven of freedom, my Father, LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE......."

May 7th, Is the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore and above lines of his could well be his epitaph. And, I have never found answers to the below questions and stands as a constant reminder that humanity en masse has a long way to travel!

Is the mind without fear and is head held high? Is knowledge free? Is the world not broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls? Are the tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection? Does the clear stream of reason not lost its way the dreary desert sand of dead habit? Is the mind led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action into that heaven of freedom? Is my country is awake!?

- Thanks
Rajhashekher BC - Raj
Sunday, MAY 8, 2011 1:22:32 PM

******************************************************************************

Renaissance Man - By Shashi Tharoor

“Nobody has excelled in so many fields or dominated his culture to the extent that Tagore has"

Towering Talent: Rabindranath Tagore

It is genuinely difficult to explain to foreigners the scale of Rabindranath Tagore’s accomplishments. Some have made glib comparisons to Shakespeare and Goethe, but neither man, despite his undoubted greatness, excelled in as many fields as the Bengali Thakur, nor dominated his culture to the extent that Rabindranath has. Think of it: he was not merely an extraordinary poet, the only Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1913, for his Gitanjali). He was also a prose-writer and essayist of the first rank, whose articles, books and monographs commanded a wide readership around the world. As a philosopher and mystic, he was perhaps the first to develop a synthesis of Eastern and Western approaches, and he developed political ideas of great depth and humanity (of which more later). He was a great, if uneven, novelist and short-story writer who produced several masterpieces that continue to be read a century and a half after his birth. He was also a playwright of rare distinction: “The Post Office”, for instance, was one of the most popular plays in the world before the Second World War.

Enormous Range

But, added to all that, were other talents: he was a painter of high quality and perceptiveness, an artist with a poet’s eye. He was a composer of over 2,000 immortal songs, of which he authored both the lyrics and the tunes, and through which he essentially founded his own branch of Indian music, known as “Rabindra Sangeet”. He is the only person to have created the national anthems of two different countries (India’s “Jana Gana Mana” and Bangladesh’s “Amar Sonar Bangla”), though both nations were born after his own death. (Even greater than both official anthems is his “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,” an inspirational poem that could serve as the anthem for any nation seeking freedom.) And he was an educator of great vision and courage, founding Vishwa Bharati at Santiniketan to offer an authentically Indian experience of higher education, following systems and approaches of his own devising. It educated the likes of Satyajit Ray and Indira Gandhi (not to mention offering a cradle to Amartya Sen, whose first name was given by Rabindranath — probably the only instance of a Nobel laureate baptising another!)

If all this were not more than enough — representing a level of achievement so towering that it is difficult to imagine an individual in any other culture who comes close — there is also the remarkable fact of Tagore’s huge worldwide impact, which even today’s Indians may have difficulty imagining. Tagore was a global giant before the era of globalisation. When he was to speak at New York’s 4,000-seat Carnegie Hall in 1930 (itself a rare enough honour, since the hall is usually reserved for concerts, not orations), more than 20,000 people were turned away from the sold-out event, creating a mass of humanity on the streets outside that blocked traffic for miles. No living writer on the planet had ever had something comparable happen, and what’s more, Tagore was handsomely paid for his speeches. One American critic, not without a tinge of jealousy, wrote acerbically that the Indian “scolds Americans at $700 per scold”. (By today’s standards that would be more like $7,00,000in purchasing power terms.)


But the chauvinist glee with which I, as an Indian writer, am celebrating Rabindranath Tagore, would not particularly have appealed to him. Though his decision to return his British knighthood after the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre led Indians to regard him as a great hero of the nationalist struggle, Tagore did not really believe in nationalism but in the values of the human spirit, transcending all national boundaries. At the same time, he was not exactly an internationalist in the classic sense beloved of U.N. types like myself. He died before the United Nations was created, but he did not think highly of its forerunner organisation, the League of Nations. Tagore wrote of the League that it was well conceived in theory but not in practice, because it was an institution in which the world was represented by national Governments and nationalist political leaders. “It is,” he wrote, “like organising a band of robbers into a police department.” There is no reason to believe he would have felt any differently about today’s U.N., which is also an organisation of States rather than peoples.

The Archetypal Sage

With his long beard and his flowing white robe, Rabindranath Tagore epitomised for many the archetype of the Indian sage, the precursor of so many godmen and gurus who have followed his footsteps to the West. There is little doubt that his magisterial mind and his authoritative presence did a great deal to inspire admiration across the world, and to spark a revival of interest in Hinduism and in the teachings of Hindu spirituality. Tagore’s Hinduism had little to do with the Hindu-ness sought to be promoted by today’s Hindutva brigades; it was a faith free of the restrictive dogma of holy writ, untrammelled in its yearning for the divine, and universalist in its conception and its appeal. This is what made his ideas so attractive to non-Indians. When the great British poet Wilfred Owen (author of the greatest anti-war poem in the English language, “Dulce et Decorum Est”) was to return to the front to give his life in the futile First World War, he recited Tagore’s “When I Go From Hence” to his mother as his last goodbye. When he was so tragically and pointlessly killed, Owen’s mother found Tagore’s poem copied out in her son’s hand in his diary.

With his typical generosity, Tagore said of the artist William Rothenstein, “He had the vision to see truth and the heart to love it.” The same was true of himself. It is reason enough, today, to pay tribute to the greatest Indian who ever picked up a pen.

WHAT EVER YOU TOUCH BECOMES GOLD

“If a man is called to be street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as MICHELANGELO painted, or BEETHOVEN composed music, or SHAKESPEARE wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well”

- MARTIN LUTHER KING. Jr



On the first day, as President Abraham Lincoln entered to give his inaugural address, just in the middle, one man stood up. He was a rich aristocrat. He said: - “Mr. Lincoln, you should not forget that your father used to make shoes for my father". And the whole Senate laughed; they thought they had made a fool of Abraham Lincoln.

But Lincoln - and that type of people are made of a totally different mettle, Lincoln looked at the man and said, " Sir, I know that my father used to make shoes in your house for your family, and there will be many others here....because the way he made shoes; nobody else can. He was a creator. His shoes were not just shoes; he poured his whole soul in it. I want to ask you, have you any complaint? Because I know how to make shoes myself; if you have complaint I can make another pair of shoes. But as far as I know, nobody has ever complained about my father's shoes. He was a genius, a great creator and I am proud of my father”

The whole Senate was dumb. They could not understand what kind of man Abraham Lincoln was. He had made shoe making an art, creativity. And he was proud because his father did his job so well that not even a single complaint had ever been heard.

It does not matter what you do. What matters is how you do it - of our own accord, with your own vision, with your own love. Then what ever you touch becomes gold.

- Anonymous
Sat, May 14, 2011 at 10:36 AM

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Perpective Of India



“I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad - Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us. "

“The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles. The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land of trifles. ...all is soul and the soul is Vishnu...cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony”

“When India was explored, and the wonderful riches of Indian theological literature found, that dispelled once and for all the dream about Christianity being the sole revelation. - Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently. " - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Four days from today, May 25th is the 211th birth anniversary of Ralph Waldo Emerson. That Emerson who if not the first, was the chief exponent who impregnated Indian thought into the western minds during 19th century. 21st century India has reached a stage where present Indian minds needs to be re - impregnated by the same Indian thoughts which western minds had been impregnated two centuries ago.

Is it not our genetic responsibility in lending our hands in building that collateral bridge of connecting the present generation with the greatness of Indian wisdom; Which stands with complete mutedness, awaiting for rejuvenation of Indian minds!?


- Thanks
Rajhashekher BC - Raj
Saturday, MAY 21, 2011